\n<\/p>\n
Kesha may have taken the dollar sign out<\/a> of her name, but now, the singer is thinking about money again \u2014 not for herself, but to fund the seed round of her new startup, Smash<\/a>.<\/p>\n According to Kesha\u2019s Instagram post<\/a>, Smash will be a \u201ccommunity-based platform to connect and protect music creators,\u201d which aligns with the mission of her new eponymous record label<\/a>, which she announced last year.<\/p>\n The 38-year-old chart-topper has always been more than a glitter-clad party girl singing about brushing her teeth with Jack Daniel\u2019s<\/a>. Beneath her infectious 2010s pop music is a darker story \u2014 one in which she felt stripped of her power<\/a>, both as an artist and a person, by a predatory record deal<\/a> that she signed when she was a teenager.<\/p>\n After a traumatic public legal battle<\/a> with her producer, Kesha now says that she is a \u201cfree woman,\u201d<\/a> and she\u2019s making new music. Both her label, Kesha Records, and the app Smash seek to help others make music without compromising their creative rights.<\/p>\n \u201cI want a place where artists and music makers of any kind can have community, they can collaborate, they can hire each other and retain all the rights to everything they create,\u201d Kesha said<\/a> in an interview with WIRED. \u201cThere\u2019s no gatekeeping of contacts.\u201d<\/p>\n She went on to describe the app as \u201cLinkedIn for music creators,\u201d or a \u201cFiverr-style marketplace.\u201d The difference is that Smash plans to prioritize artists\u2019 rights at every stage.<\/p>\n Kesha\u2019s CTO on the project is Alan Cannistraro. He spent 12 years at Apple building some of the first iOS apps, then worked at Facebook, where he built the Year-In-Review feature. He left to start a social video platform called Rheo<\/a>, which TechCrunch covered in 2016.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n